James Orr: Science and Christian Faith

James Orr was a contributor to the 12-volume set, The Fundamentals,
one of the foundations of modern fundamentalism. Significant
statements in Orr's text are
highlighted in yellow. My own comments are in blue

In many quarters the belief is industriously circulated that the
advance of "science," meaning by this chiefly the physical sciences--astronomy,
geology, biology, and the like--has proved damaging, if not destructive, to the claims of
the Bible, and the truth of Christianity. Science and Christianity are pitted against each
other. Their interests are held to be antagonistic. Books are written, like Draper's
"Conflict Between Religion and Science," White's "Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom," and Foster's "Finality of the Christian
Religion," to show that this warfare between science and religion has ever been going
on, and can never in the nature of things cease till theology is destroyed, and science
holds sole sway in men's minds.

This was not the attitude of the older investigators of science.
Most of these were devout Christian men. Naville, in his book, "Modern Physics,"
has shown that the great discoverers in science in past times were nearly always devout
men. This was true of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, and Newton; it was true of men like Faraday,
Brewster, Kelvin, and a host of others in more recent times. The late Professor Tait, of
Edinburgh, writing in "The International Review," said: "The assumed
incompatibility of religion and science has been so often and confidently asserted in
recent times that it has come * * * to be taken for granted by the writers of leading
articles, etc., and it is, of course, perpetually thrust before their too trusting
readers. But the whole thing is a mistake, and a mistake so grave that no truly scientific
man * * * runs, in Britain, at least, the smallest risk of making it. * * * With a few,
and these very singular exceptions, the truly scientific men and true theologians of the
present day have not found themselves under the necessity of quarrelling." The late
Professor G. J. Romanes has, in his "Thoughts on Religion," left the testimony
that one thing which largely influenced him in his return to faith was the fact that in
his own university of Cambridge nearly all the men of most eminent scientific attainments
were avowed Christians. "The curious thing," he says, "is that all the most
illustrious names were ranged on the side of orthodoxy. Sir W. Manson, Sir George Stokes,
Professors Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, and Bayley-not to mention a number of lesser
lights, such as Routte, Todhunter, Ferrers, etc.,--were all avowed Christians" (page
137). It may be held that things are now changed. To some extent this is perhaps true, but
anyone who knows the opinions of our leading scientific men is aware that to accuse the
majority of being men of unchristian or unbelieving sentiment is to utter a gross libel.

If by a conflict of science and religion is meant that grievous
mistakes have often been made, and unhappy misunderstandings have arisen, on one side and
the other, in the course of the progress of science,-that new theories and discoveries, as
in astronomy and geology, have been looked on with distrust by those who thought that the
truth of the Bible was being affected by them,-that in some cases the dominant church
sought to stifle the advance of truth by persecution, this is not to be denied. It is an
unhappy illustration of how the best of men can at times err in matters which they
imperfectly understand, or where their prejudices and traditional ideas are affected. But
it proves nothing against the value of the discoveries themselves, or the deeper insight
into the ways of God of the men who made them, or of real contradiction between the new
truth and the essential teaching of the Scriptures. On the contrary, as a minority
generally perceived from the first, the supposed disharmony with the truths of the Bible
was an unreal one, early giving way to better understanding on both sides, and finally
opening up new vistas in the contemplation of the Creator's power, wisdom, and majesty. It
is never to be forgotten, also, that the error was seldom all on one side; that science,
too, has in numberless cases put forth its hasty and unwarrantable theories and has often
had to retract even its truer speculations within limits which brought them into more
perfect harmony with revealed truth. If theology has resisted novelties of science, it has
often had good reason for so doing.

It is well in any case that this alleged conflict of Christianity
with science should be carefully probed, and that it should be seen where exactly the
truth lies in regard to it.

I. Science and Law - Miracle

It is perhaps more in its general outlook on the world than
in its specific results that science is alleged to be in conflict with the Bible and
Christianity. The Bible is a record of revelation. Christianity is a supernatural system.
Miracle, in the sense of a direct entrance of God in word and deed into human history for
gracious ends, is of the essence of it. On the other hand, the advance of science has done
much to deepen the impression of the universal reign of natural law. The effect has been
to lead multitudes whose faith is not grounded in direct spiritual experience to look
askance on the whole idea of the supernatural. God, it is assumed, has His own mode of
working, and that is by means of secondary agencies operating in absolutely uniform ways;
miracles, therefore, cannot be admitted. And, since miracles are found in
Scripture,--since the entire Book rests on the idea of a supernatural economy of
grace,--the whole must be dismissed as in conflict with the modern mind. Professor G. B.
Foster goes so far as to declare that a man can hardly be intellectually honest who in
these days professes to believe in the miracles of the Bible.

It is overstating the case to speak of this repugnance to
miracle, and rejection of it in the Bible, as if it were really new. It is as old as
rationalism itself. You find it in Spinoza, in Reimarus, in Strauss, in numberless others.
DeWette and Vatke, among earlier Old Testament critics, manifested it as strongly as their
followers do now, and made it a pivot of their criticism. It governed the attacks on
Christianity made in the age of the deists. David Hume wrote an essay against miracles
which he thought had settled the question forever. But, seriously considered, can this
attack on the idea of miracle, derived from our experience of the uniformity of nature's
laws, be defended? Does it not in itself involve a huge assumption, and run counter to
experience and common sense? The question is one well worth asking.

First, what is a miracle? Various definitions might be
given, but it will be enough to speak of it here as any effect in nature, or deviation
from its ordinary course, due to the interposition of a supernatural cause. It is no
necessary part, it should be observed, of the Biblical idea of miracle, that natural
agencies should not be employed as far as they will go. If the drying of the Red Sea to
let the Israelites pass over was due in part to a great wind that blew, this was none the
less of God's ordering, and did not detract from the supernatural character of the event
as a whole. It was still at God's command that the waters were parted, and that a way was
made at that particular time and place for the people to go through. These are what
theologians call "providential" miracles, in which, so far as one can see,
natural agencies, under divine direction, suffice to produce the result. There is,
however, another and more conspicuous class, the instantaneous cleansing of the leper, e.
g., or the raising of the dead, in which natural agencies are obviously altogether
transcended. It is this class about which the chief discussion goes on. They are miracles
in the stricter sense of a complete transcendence of nature's laws.

What, in the next place, is meant by the uniformity of nature?
There are, of course, laws of nature--no one disputes that. It is quite a mistake to
suppose that the Bible, though not written in the twentieth century, knows nothing of a
regular order and system of nature. The world is God's world; it is established by His
decree; He has given to every creature its nature, its bounds, its limits; all things
continue according to His ordinances ( Psa. 119 :91). Only, law in the Bible is never
viewed as having an independent existence. It is always regarded as an expression of the
power or wisdom of God., And this gives the right point of view for considering the
relation of law to miracle. What, to begin with, do we mean by a "law" of
nature? It is, as science will concede, only our registered observation of the order in
which we find causes and events linked together in our experience. That they are so linked
no one questions. If they were not, we should have no world in which we could live at all.
But then, next, what do we mean by "uniformity" in this connection? We mean no
more than this-that, given like causes, operating under like conditions, like effects will
follow. Quite true; no one denies this either.

But then, as J. S. Mill, in his Logic, pointed out long
ago, a miracle in the strict sense is not a denial of either of these truths. A miracle is
not the assertion that, the same causes operating, a different result is produced. It is,
on the contrary, the assertion that a new cause has intervened, and this a cause which the
theists cannot deny to be a vera causa--the will and power of God. Just as, when
I lift my arm, or throw a stone high in the air, I do not abolish the law of gravitation
but counteract or overrule its purely natural action by the introduction of a new
spiritual force; so, but in an infinitely higher way, is a miracle due to the
interposition of the First Cause of all, God Himself. What the scientific man needs to
prove to establish his objection to miracle is, not simply that natural causes operate
uniformly, but that no other than natural causes exist; that natural causes exhaust all
the causation in the universe. And that, we hold, he can never do.

There comes a point where this sort of
reasoning becomes like the famous "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter,
where the author argues that even if people watched every chimney in the world
on Christmas Eve, it wouldn't disprove the existence of Santa. Orr places the
burden of proof on people who doubt miracles, yet surely there comes a
point where the rarity of miracles tells. There are certain classes of miracles
that never seem to happen; people have allegedly been cured miraculously
of disease but nobody has ever had a severed limb regenerated, at least under
conditions sufficient to exclude deception. Dead people have been claimed to be
brought back to life, but never a decapitation victim.

It is obvious from what has now been said that the real question at
issue in miracle is not natural law, but Theism. It is to be recognized at once
that miracle can only profitably be discussed on the basis of a theistic view of the
universe. It is not disputed that there are views of the universe which exclude miracle.
The atheist cannot admit miracle, for he has no God to work miracles. The pantheist cannot
admit miracle, for to him God and nature are one. The deist cannot admit miracle, for he
has separated God and the universe so far that he can never bring them together again. The
question is not, Is miracle possible on an atheistic, a materialistic, a pantheistic, view
of the world, but, Is it possible on a theistic view--on the view of God as at once
immanent in His world, and in infinite ways transcending it? I say nothing of intellectual
"honesty," but I do marvel, as I have often said, at the assurance of
any one who presumes to say that, for the highest and holiest ends in His personal
relations with His creatures, God can work only within the limits which nature imposes;
that He cannot act without and above nature's order if it pleases Him to do so.
Miracles
stand or fall by their evidence, but the attempt to rule them out by any a priori
dictum as to the uniformity of natural law must inevitably fail. The same applies to the
denial of providence or of answers to prayer on the ground of the uniformity of natural
law. Here no breach of nature's order is affirmed, but only a governance or direction of
nature of which man's own use of natural laws, without breach of them, for special ends,
affords daily examples.

The idea that "miracles stand or fall by
their evidence" gets to the heart of the problem. Despite attempts to formulate
definitions that separate natural law and miracles, and sound methodological
reasons for excluding miracles from science, a key reason scientists dismiss
miracles is that the credibility of the people who assert them is so poor, and
generally the more militantly they assert miracles and bash science for
its skepticism, the worse their credibility on wholly non-religious grounds.
They write on subjects they know nothing about, fail to check facts, make
obvious fatal errors in reasoning, slander their opponents, and so on.

II. Scripture and the Special Sciences

"Special Sciences" apparently means those sciences
that deal with specific features of the physical universe, as opposed to those
that deal with general properties of matter and laws of nature, like
mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

Approaching more nearly the alleged conflict of the Bible or
Christianity with the special sciences, a first question of importance is, What is the general
relation of the Bible to science? How does it claim to relate itself to the advances
of natural knowledge? Here, it is to be feared, mistakes are often made on both sides--on
the side of science in affirming contrariety of the Bible with scientific results where
none really exists; on the side of believers in demanding that the Bible be taken as a
text-book of the newest scientific discoveries, and trying by forced methods to read these
into them. The truth on this point lies really on the surface. The Bible clearly does not
profess to anticipate the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Its design is very different; namely, to reveal God and His will and His
purposes of grace to men, and, as involved in this, His general relation to the creative
world, its dependence in all its parts on Him, and His orderly government of it in
Providence for His wise and good ends. Natural things are taken as they are given, and
spoken of in simple, popular language, as we ourselves every day speak of them. The world
it describes is the world men know and live in, and it is described as it appears, not as,
in its recondite researches, science reveals its inner constitution to us. Wise expositors
of the Scriptures, older and younger, have always recognized this, and have not attempted
to force its language further. To take only one example, John Calvin, who wrote before the
Copernican system of astronomy had obtained common acceptance, in his commentary on the
first chapter of Genesis penned these wise words: "He who would learn astronomy and
other recondite arts," he said, "let him go elsewhere. Moses wrote in a popular
style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons indued with common sense are
able to understand. * * * He does not call us up to heaven, he only proposes things that
lie open before our eyes." To this hour, with all the light of modern science around
us, we speak of sun, moon and stars "rising" and "setting," and nobody
misunderstands or affirms contradiction with science. There is no doubt another side to
this, for it is just as true that in depicting natural things, the Bible, through the
Spirit of revelation that animates it, seizes things in so just a light-still with
reference to its own purposes-that the mind is prevented from being led astray from the
great truths intended to be conveyed.

It will serve to illustrate these positions as to the relation of
the Bible to science if we look at them briefly in their application to the two sciences
of astronomy and geology, in regard to which conflict has often been
alleged.

1. The change from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system
of astronomy--from the view which regarded the earth as the center of the
universe to the modern and undoubtedly true view of the earth as moving round the sun,
itself, with its planets, but one of innumerable orbs in the starry heavens--of necessity
created great searchings of heart among those who thought that the language of the Bible
committed them to the older system. For a time there was strong opposition on the part of
many theologians, as well as of students of science, to the new discoveries of the
telescope. Galileo was imprisoned by the church. But truth prevailed, and it was soon
perceived that the Bible, using the language of appearances, was no more committed to the
literal moving of the sun round the earth than are our modern almanacs, which employ the
same forms of speech. One would have to travel far in these days to find a Christian who
feels his faith in the least affected by the discovery of the true doctrine of the solar
system. He rejoices that he understands nature better, and reads his Bible without the
slightest sense of contradiction. Yet Strauss was confident that the Copernican system had
given its death-blow to Christianity; as Voltaire before him had affirmed that
Christianity would be overthrown by the discovery of the law of gravitation and would not
survive a century. Newton, the humble-minded Christian discoverer of the law of
gravitation, had no such fear, and time has shown that it was he, not Voltaire, who was
right. These are specimens of the "conflicts" of Christianity with science.

The so-called "astronomical objection" to Christianity
more specially takes the form of enlarging on the illimitableness of the universe
disclosed by science in contrast with the peculiar interest of God in man
displayed in the Christian Gospel. "What is man that thou art mindful of him?"
(Psa. 8:4). Is it credible that this small speck in an infinity of worlds should be
singled out as the scene of so tremendous an exhibition of God's love and grace as is
implied in the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Sacrifice of the Cross, the Redemption
of Man? The day is well-nigh past when even this objection is felt to carry much weight.
Apart from the strange fact that up to this hour no evidence seems to exist of other
worlds inhabited by rational intelligences like man--no planets, no known systems (on this
point A. R. Wallace's "Man and the Universe" may be consulted)-- thoughtful
people have come to realize that quantitative bigness is no measure of God's love and
care; that the value of a soul is not to be estimated in terms of stars and planets; that
sin is not less awful a fact even if it were proved that this is the only spot in the
universe in which it has emerged.

This was apparently once regarded as a
cogent argument against religion, since C. S. Lewis also deals with it in a
number of his writings. One effective rebuttal, which Lewis mentions but Orr
doesn't, is that Ptolemy's Almagest specifically states (Book I, Chapter
6) that the earth is a mere point in comparison to the size of the heavens.
There never was a time when Christianity believed the universe to be
small, so attacking a position Christianity never held is odd logic.
Nevertheless, people have done it and occasionally still do. Ptolemy also
explicitly states that the earth is a sphere, and since Ptolemy ruled medieval
astronomy, it follows that medieval scholars never believed in a flat
earth.

It is of the essence of God's infinity that He cares for
the little as well as for the great; not a blade of grass could wave, or the insect of a
day live its brief life upon the wing, if God were not actually present, and minutely
careful of it. Man's position in the universe remains, by consent, or rather by proof, of
science, an altogether peculiar one. Link between the material and the spiritual, he is
the one being that seems fitted, as Scripture affirms he is, to be the bond of unity in
the creation (Heb. 2:6-9). This is the hope held out to us in Christ (Eph. 1:10).
One
should reflect also that, while the expanse of the physical universe is a modern
thought, there has never been a time in the Christian Church when God-Himself
infinite--was not conceived of as adored and served by countless hosts of
ministering spirits. Man was never thought of as the only intelligence in creation. The
mystery of the divine love to our world was in reality as great before as after the
stellar expanses were discovered. The sense of "conflict," therefore, though not
the sense of wonder, awakened by the "exceeding riches" of God's grace to man in
Christ Jesus, vanishes with increasing realization of the depths and heights of God's love
"which passeth knowledge" (Eph. 3:19). Astronomy's splendid demonstration of the
majesty of God's wisdom and power is undiminished by any feeling of disharmony with the
Gospel.

This is a remarkable passage, since it
predates the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by many decades.

2. As it is with astronomy, so it has been with the
revelations of geology of the age and gradual formation of the earth. Here also doubt and
suspicion were--naturally enough in the circumstances--at first awakened. The gentle
Cowper could write in his "Task" of those

"* * * who drill and bore
The solid earth and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn
That He who made it, and revealed its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age."

If the intention of the first chapter of Genesis was really to give
us the "date" of the creation of the earth and heavens, the objection would be
unanswerable. But things, as in the case of astronomy, are now better understood, and
few
are disquieted in reading their Bibles because it is made certain that the world is
immensely older than the 6,000 years which the older chronology gave it. Geology is felt
only to have expanded our ideas of the vastness and marvel of the Creator's operations
through the aeons of time during which the world, with its teeming populations of fishes,
birds, reptiles, mammals, was preparing for man's abode--when the mountains were being
upheaved, the valleys being scooped out, and veins of precious metals being inlaid into
the crust of the earth.

This is certainly not true today, where an
ancient earth, evolution, and anti-religion have been conflated by many
fundamentalists into a single threatening force.

Does science, then, really, contradict Genesis I.? Not surely if
what has been above said of the essentially popular character of the allusions to natural
things in the Bible be remembered. Here certainly is no detailed description of the
process of the formation of the earth in terms anticipative of modern science--terms which
would have been unintelligible to the original readers-but a sublime picture, true to the
order of nature, as it is to the broad facts even of geological succession.
If it tells
how God called heaven and earth into being, separated light from darkness, sea from land,
clothed the world with vegetation, gave sun and moon their appointed rule of day and
night, made fowl to fly, and sea-monsters to plow the deep, created the cattle and beasts
of the field, and finally made man, male and female, in His own image, and established him
as ruler over all God's creation, this orderly rise of created forms, man crowning the
whole, these deep ideas of the narrative, setting the world at the very beginning in its
right relation to God, and laying the foundations of an enduring philosophy of religion,
are truths which science does nothing to subvert, but in myriad ways confirms.
The
"six days" may remain as a difficulty to some, but, if this is not part of the
symbolic setting of the picture-a great divine "week" of work--one may well ask,
as was done by Augustine long before geology was thought of, what kind of "days"
these were which rolled their course before the sun, with its twenty-four hours of diurnal
measurement, was appointed to that end?
There is no violence done to the narrative in
substituting in thought "aeonic" days-vast cosmic periods-for "days"
on our narrower, sun-measured scale. Then the last trace of apparent "conflict"
disappears.

Orr sees the vastness of geologic time as
a saga or epic which the Genesis narrative only hints at. Using terms like
"saga" or "epic" is misleading, since to most readers the terms mean "long dull
pointless poem I had to read once in Lit class." In cultures where epics and
sagas were living art forms, they were not viewed as make-believe. Their point
was to catch the hearer up in the sweep of the story (recall the first time you
ever saw Star Wars) rather than convey literal details. Orr seems to
understand this concept and feels it in his contemplation of deep space and
geologic time.

III. Evolution and Man

In recent years the point in which "conflict" between
Scripture and science is most frequently urged is the apparent contrariety of the theory
of evolution to the Bible story of the direct creation of the animals
and man. This might be met, and often is, as happened in the previous cases, by denying
the reality of any evolutionary process in nature.
Here also, however, while it must be
conceded that evolution is not yet proved, there seems a growing appreciation of
the strength of the evidence for the fact of some form of evolutionary origin of
species--that is, of some genetic connection of higher with lower forms.
Together with
this, at the same time, there is manifest an increasing disposition to limit the scope of
evolution, and to modify the theory in very essential points-those very points in which an
apparent conflict with Scripture arose.

"Genetic" here means "causal" or "related
by origins" since genes had only recently been discovered when Orr wrote and DNA
was still unknown.

Much of the difficulty on this subject has arisen from the
unwarrantable confusion or identification of evolution with Darwinism. Darwinism
is a theory of the process of evolution, and both on account of the skill with which it
was presented, and of the singular eminence of its propounder, obtained for a time a very
remarkable prestige. In these later days, as may be seen by consulting a book like R.
Otto's "Naturalism and Religion," published in "The Crown Library,"
that prestige has greatly declined. A newer evolution has arisen which breaks with Darwin
on the three points most essential to his theory: 1. The fortuitous character of the
variations on which "natural selection" works. Variations are now felt to
be along definite lines, and to be guided to definite ends. 2. The insufficiency of
"natural selection" (on which Darwin almost wholly relied) to accomplish
the tasks Darwin assigned to it. 3. The slow and insensible rate of the changes
by which new species were supposed to be produced. Instead of this the newer tendency is
to seek the origin of new species in rapid and sudden changes, the causes of which lie
within the organism--in "mutations," as they are coming to be called--so that
the process may be as brief as formerly it was supposed to be long.

Part of the problem with evolution was
that it quickly became entangled by proponents and opponents alike in social
agendas, and so "Darwinism" could mean evolution in general, or the specific
model of evolution as outlined by Darwin, or the complex of social, political
and ethical ideas purportedly based on Darwin. Although Orr distinguishes
between evolution and Darwin, and restricts the discussion to mechanisms, it's
fair to wonder whether he is fully clear on the distinction between Darwin's
ideas and the agendas pushed forth under the label "Darwinism."

In any case, none of Orr's objections
stand up today. There's no evidence that there is any pre-programmed nature to
evolution, and natural selection and slow processes are as much in the picture
as they ever were.

"Evolution,"
in short, is coming to be recognized as but a new name for "creation," only that
the creative power now works from within, instead of, as in the old conception,
in an external, plastic fashion. It is, however, creation none the less.

Taken at face value, this is a position
creationists now call "theistic evolution." Much as it supports evolution, it
should probably not be taken at face value, since a number of Orr's comments
elsewhere are decidedly more conservative. It's possible Orr got a little
carried away trying to heal the rift between religion and science.

In truth, no conception of evolution can be formed, compatible with
all the facts of science, which does not take account, at least at certain great critical
points, of the entrance of new factors into the process we call creation. 1. One
such point is the transition from inorganic to organic existence the entrance of the new
power of life. It is hopeless to seek to account for life by purely mechanical
and chemical agencies, and science has well-nigh given up the attempt.

Ironically, less than a century earlier
the spontaneous generation of life from non-living material was almost
universally accepted. Nobody appears to have used the Bible to criticize
spontaneous generation. This statement may have been true when Orr wrote, simply
because it would have been hopelessly premature to try to determine the chemical
origin of life. It certainly is not true today.

2. A second point
is in the transition from purely organic development to consciousness. A
sensation is a mental fact different in kind from any merely organic change, and
inexplicable by it. Here, accordingly, is a new rise, revealing previously unknown
spiritual powers. 3. The third point is in the transition to rationality, personality,
and moral life in man. This, as man's capacity for self-conscious, self-directed,
progressive life evinces, is something different from the purely animal consciousness, and
marks the beginning of a new kingdom.. Here, again, the Bible and science are felt to be
in harmony. Man is the last of God's created works--the crown and explanation of the
whole--and he is made in God's image. To account for him, a special act of the Creator,
constituting him what he is, must be presupposed. This creative act does not relate to the
soul only, for higher spiritual powers could not be put into a merely animal brain. There
must be a rise on the physical side as well, corresponding with the mental advance. In
body, as in spirit, man comes from his Creator's hand.

If this new evolutionary conception is accepted, most of the
difficulties which beset the Darwinian theory fall away. 1. For one thing, man need no
longer be thought of as a slow development from the animal stage--an ascent
through brutishness and savagery from an ape-like form. His origin may be as sudden as
Genesis represents. 2. The need for assuming an enormous antiquity of man to
allow for the slow development is no longer felt. And (3), the need of assuming man's original
condition to have been one of brutal passion and subjection to natural impulse
disappears.

This reflects 19th century white supremacy
more than it does science. Victorians may have assumed that primitive people
were necessarily brutal; we do not share that perspective.

Man may have come from his Creator's hand in as morally pure a state, and as
capable of sinless development, as Genesis and Paul affirm. This also is the most worthy
view to take of man's origin. It is a view borne out by the absence of all reliable
evidence of those ape-like intermediate forms which, on the other hypothesis, must have
intervened between the animal-progenitors and the finished human being. It is a view not
contradicted by the alleged evidences of man's very great antiquity100,000, 200,000, or
500,000 years--frequently relied on; for most of these and the extravagant measurements of
time connected with them, are precarious in the extreme. The writer's book, "God's
Image in Man and Its Defacement," may be consulted on these points.

The conclusion from the whole is, that, up to the present hour,
science and the Biblical views of God, man, and the world, do not stand in any real
relation of conflict. Each book of God's writing reflects light upon the pages of the
other, but neither contradicts the other's essential testimony. Science itself seems now
disposed to take a less materialistic view of the origin and nature of things than it did
a decade or two ago, and to interpret the creation more in the light of the spiritual. The
experience of the Christian believer, with the work of missions in heathen lands,
furnishes a testimony that cannot be disregarded to the reality of this spiritual world,
and of the regenerating, transforming forces proceeding from it. To God be all the glory!

A surprising number of early founders of
fundamentalism seem to have had no problem with a long geologic time scale, or
even with a gradual development of life forms. They drew the line at evolution
of the soul or evolution of Judaism from older religions, and opposed anything
that threatened to undermine the orthodox view of Christ, but they were much
more concerned with attempts by literary critics to assert multiple authorship
of books of the Bible, post-dating (writing in prophetic form after the
prophesied events occurred) and borrowing from non-Biblical literature.

They tended to postulate a separate
creation for humanity, but that may well have been as much a matter of
anthropomorphism as theology; they were just unprepared to recognize creatures
different from modern humans as human and having a soul.